Tastingmenu Gets Schooled #1 Asia, February 17, 2006 — After our December break we embarked on a new series here at tastingmenu where we "get schooled". The first part has been the recounting of our almost three week trip to Asia. It's long been a dream of mine to really travel around Asia and experience so much of the food firsthand. It's been a challenge for example loving Thai food my whole life and never tasting it in Thailand and knowing what the true baseline is. I'd been to Tokyo before, but Hong Kong, Bangkok, and  Cambodia were all new for me. I don't know that I have any deep or insightful lessons learned from my trip other than I can't wait to go back.

After roughly 26 proper meals (not including food on planes and grabbing random stuff for breakfast) I feel like even though I barely scratched the surface of what's available in the region, it was well worth it and my horizons were definitely broadened. The number of truly stellar meals I had in such a short time was pretty fantastic. And Asian food is still my clear favorite spectrum of ethnic cuisine. Below I've included links to the entire catalog of imagery from the trip. Hong Kong, Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Angkor Wat, back to Hong Kong, and Tokyo.  426 photos. Click on the thumbnails below to check out each of the albums. Enjoy.

Starting next week we go on to part #2. You'll have to wait until then to see what it is. I promise it's very different than a trip across Asia.